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Windows Drivers Under Linux?
sniggly writes "The Inquirer has an article about how Montreal, CA based Linuxant
has created a 'compatibility wrapper' allowing standard Windows NDIS 5.0 drivers to work on linux. After pointing to another project allowing windows printer drivers to work on OS/2 the author asks 'Are printer and network card drivers going to become, over time, a commodity with Win32 drivers one day the 'de-facto standard' run via wrappers?"
What about all the windows drivers which have a 'light' NDIS layer solely to establish a communications channel with the hardware and assignment of resources. They then rely on more complex programs to do what should happen in the driver.
I'm thinking of several printers, including the new MFDs, not to mention the separate mess called 'WinModems'.
No thanks, id rather have native drivers for my hardware. Not some sort of kludgy hack to make windows drivers work..
Even if it worked well, there is no guarantee that Microsoft wouldn't make it impossible to keep doing this, leaving us out in the cold.
+ you cant honestly think performance and stability would be the same as a true, well written, native driver for your chosen OS ( regardless of what that OS is )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Not a good thing. If Drivers are written for windows and then emulated to other OS's it will give Windows a permanent performance advantage.
The way I see it, all of these layers of software are what are going to require faster processors. What exactly will you not be able to do next year with the 3Ghz processor you bought this year? Then again, are these layers going to cause bugs that can never be found?
This is an even worse idea than WINE. The only thing we'll gain from this is even fewer native Linux drivers. Im sure that if this works, many hardware companies won't even consider making native Linux drivers, because users can just use DriverLoader.
Things like DriverLoader and WINE are and will be misused by companies to claim Linux compatability or make quick and low quality Linux solutions. It would be great if it where to be used only as a last resort, not as a permanent solution.
We should kill of Linuxant before they hurt anyone.
In general it is not possible to use drivers under any other OS than the one it was developed for. And any kernel developer will tell you it is not a good idea. A driver needs to interface not only with the device, but also the OS. No matter how well it works with the device, it doesn't help making it work with another OS. Expecting a Windows driver to work with Linux is like expecting an SCSI driver to work with an IDE harddisk (maybe not the best anology, but it was the best I could come up with, and they have certainly been seen worse). In some cases you might be able to provide a wrapper, that makes it work, but it requires good knowledge about the interface in both directions, and the end result certainly isn't going to be as good as a native driver. If hardware vendors want a wide range of compatibility, they can easilly achieve it, it just takes a few steps.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Secondly, this is becoming less and less of an issue. More and more add-on hardware is built on standardized models of hardware interaction, such as the USB driver classes, and thus works with the generic drivers in the Linux kernel. Of the remainder, more and more hardware companies are seeing the value in cooperating with Open Source and opening up their specs. The probability that a random piece of peripheral hardware you bought at CompUSA or some such will work with Linux out of the box has been steadily increasing and is now quite high.
In short, this is a non-issue.
Take a look at the linux games area - Loki is dead, Transgaming is alive and well ... Loki's approach was technically superior (very stable ports as opposed to games which play ok, but only ok), but the economics were not.
Emulation is good for creating a market; when the market is big enough, native ports and drivers will arrive as well.
The Raven